Ancient Egypt eBook

powers she acknowledged as her suzerain. She
had now (about B.C. 650) for above twenty years been
fought over by the two chief kingdoms of the earth—­each
of them had traversed with huge armies, as many as
five or six times, the Nile valley from one extremity
to the other; the cities had been half ruined, harvest
after harvest destroyed, trees cut down, temples rifled,
homesteads burnt, villas plundered. Thebes, the
Hundred-gated, probably for many ages quite the most
magnificent city in the world, had become a by-word
for desolation (Nahum iii. 8, 9); Memphis, Heliopolis,
Tanis, Sais, Mendes, Bubastis, Heracleopolis, Hermopolis;
Crocodilopolis, had been taken and retaken repeatedly;
the old buildings and monuments had been allowed to
fall into decay; no king had been firmly enough established
on his throne to undertake the erection of any but
insignificant new ones. Egypt was “fallen,
fallen, fallen—­fallen from her high estate;”
an apathy, not unlike the stillness of death, brooded
over her; literature was silent, art extinct; hope
of recovery can scarcely have lingered in many bosoms.
As events proved, the vital spark was not actually
fled; but the keenest observer would scarcely have
ventured to predict, at any time between B.C. 750 and
B.C. 650, such a revival as marked the period between
B.C. 650 and B.C. 530.

XXII.

THE CORPSE COMES TO LIFE AGAIN—­PSAMATIK
I. AND HIS SON NECO.

When a country has sunk so gradually, so persistently,
and for so long a series of years as Egypt had now
been sinking, if there is a revival, it must almost
necessarily come from without. The corpse cannot
rise without assistance—­the expiring patient
cannot cure himself. All the vital powers being
sapped, all the energies having departed, the Valley
of the Shadow of Death having been entered, nothing
can arrest dissolution but some foreign stock, some
blood not yet vitiated, some “saviour”
sent by Divine providence from outside the nation (Isa.
xix. 20), to recall the expiring life, to revivify
the paralyzed frame, to infuse fresh energy into it,
and to make it once more live, breathe, act, think,
assert itself. Yet the saviour must not be altogether
from without. He must not be a conqueror, for
conquest necessarily weakens and depresses; he must
not be too remote in blood, or he will lack the power
fully to understand and sympathize with the nation
which he is to restore, and without true understanding
and true sympathy he can effect nothing; he must not
be a stranger to the nation’s recent history,
or he will make mistakes that will be irremediable.
What is wanted is a scion of a foreign stock, connected
by marriage and otherwise with the nation that he
is to regenerate, and well acquainted with its circumstances,
character, position, history, virtues, weaknesses.
No entirely new man can answer to these requirements;
he must be found, if he is to be found at all, among
the principal men of the time, whose lot has for some
considerable period been cast in with the State which
is to be renovated.